Questions

for Mueller:

1. In the second paragraph of your report, you state that “the Russian government
interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.
Evidence of Russian government operations began to surface in mid-2016.” The
report traced this interference back to 2014. Who was the president of the
United States when Russia’s attack on our election was unfolding?

2. Since Donald Trump was not president when Russia attacked our electoral
process and since you specifically were tasked with conducting “a full and
thorough investigation of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the
2016 presidential election,” did you investigate why the Obama Administration,
including CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James
Clapper, let this happen?

3. Your report seems to indicate that you could not corroborate the Christopher
Steele dossier. What steps did you take to review Steele’s source material?

• Follow ups:
• Did you identify any of his original sources and speak to them?
• Did you interview Steele directly? Was that interview transcribed?
• Did any of Steele’s sources come from inside the United States—e.g., the State
Department or individuals with ties to the Democratic National Committee or
the Clinton campaign?
• Did you determine whether Steele paid any of these sources? If so, how much
and who did he pay?

4. Public reports indicate that your number two, Andrew Weissmann, received
briefings from Justice Department official Bruce Ohr regarding the Trump
investigation as early as the summer of 2016. When did you and Weissmann
first discuss the possibility of Russian interference in the 2016 election?

Follow up:
• In 2016, did “anyone” discuss with you the possibility of you
participating in an investigation of Trump?

• During the course of the investigation, did the special counsel’s office
receive any assistance or leads from “anyone” affiliated with Fusion GPS
or Glenn Simpson?

5. Did you authorize any contact with the media by any member of the special
counsel staff (including investigators)?







6. Would you object to an investigation into whether any of the more than 25 leaks
attributed to your team violated DOJ policy on media contact or its Rules of
Professional Conduct regarding prosecutors releasing information to the media
about a target?

7. How did the Washington Post obtain a copy of your March 17 letter to Attorney
General William Barr, in which you objected to his summary of the bottom-line
conclusions of your report?

8. You indicate in your report that the investigation into the Trump campaign
began with a contact between George Papadopoulos and Alexander Downer.
Where did you get that information?

9. The New York Times has speculated that the Russians may have fed Steele
disinformation in order to sow chaos into the U.S. election. Do you agree or
disagree with that assessment? Why? Why doesn’t your report address this
aspect of Russian interference?

10. Was there any discussion within the special counsel team on whether to include
in the report information about the Fusion GPS research project on Trump and
Russia?

11. What is your understanding of why the FBI didn’t notify Donald Trump that
there was a concern the Russians were trying to influence the election? Was the
FBI trying to catch Trump in the act of colluding?

12. Public reports indicate that you learned of a series of text messages between FBI
employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the summer of 2017 and that you
ultimately dismissed Strzok from the investigation. Is that true? Which text
messages caused you concern?

13. It’s also been reported that you returned or allowed to be returned the
Strzok/Page cell phones back to the FBI information technology department,
leading to the irretrievable erasing of many of those text messages. Why didn’t
you preserve their text messages after you learned that they had exchanged
inappropriate text messages on their phones?

14. Public reports indicate that FBI investigators did not think that former national
security advisor Michael Flynn intentionally lied to the FBI during his interview
and that his misstatements were inadvertent or the result of misremembering.
Is that true?

15. Why was a summary of Flynn’s interview prepared in July 2017, approximately
six months after it occurred?

 16. Did any of the members of the special counsel team seek or were they provided
an ethics opinion regarding any conflicts of interest? Who? What were the
sources of those potential conflicts?

17. On April 27, 2018, the House issued a report finding Trump did not collude
with the Russians. Why were you not prepared to issue a similar finding in early
2018? What steps in your investigation remained unresolved that kept you from
reaching a similar conclusion last year?

18. Barr testified that if a president is falsely accused of a crime, he may properly
end an investigation into that accusation if the investigation is interfering with
his executive functions. Do you agree?

Follow up:
• Why or why not?

19. Jeannie Rhee, a member of your team, was assigned to work on the
Papadopoulos case. She also worked to protect the Clinton Foundation in a case
a few months earlier while at the law firm WilmerHale your former firm.

20. It has since come out that Clinton paid for the Steele dossier that falsely accused
Trump of colluding with the Russians. To deflect blame from Clinton for starting
the Russia investigation, many claimed the investigation didn’t start with the
Steele dossier but with the Papadopoulos encounter with Downer. Can you see
how Rhee’s participation in the prosecution of Papadopoulos shields Clinton
(Rhee’s former client) from liability for the Steele dossier?

21. There is a report that you turned over the day-to-day operations of the special
counsel team to Weissmann. How do you respond to that account?

Follow up:
• Is there any evidence or log of how much time you physically came to the
office to supervise the team?

22. Several of the public announcements made in connection with the special
counsel report coincided with important foreign policy trips by the president.
For example, days before the president had his first summit with Vladamir Putin
on July 16, 2018, the special counsel unsealed indictments against Russian GRU
actors and the deputy attorney general held a highly sensational press
conference.

23. In November 2018, a number of leaks that appeared to originate from your
office coincided with the president’s G-20 summit, which may have played a role
in the cancellation of a meeting between Trump and Putin. Has there ever been
any discussion within the special counsel’s office regarding its impact on
current events?


 Follow up:
• Was any strategy discussed to either minimize or maximize that impact?

24. Several members of the special counsel team left high-paying jobs outside of the
government. For example, you and Rhee both left jobs at WilmerHale. Were you
aware of what, if any, assurances or arrangements were made so people would
have jobs to return to when the special counsel project was over?
Follow up:
• Have any of those arrangements or assurances been submitted to an
ethics advisor for an opinion on conflicts of interest?

25. Did the special counsel’s office attempt to interview Julian Assange to determine
how he obtained the emails from the DNC and the John Podesta hacks? If not
why?

26. Did you look into any connections between the Hillary Clinton campaign and
Russian interests since you also specifically were tasked with investigating “any
matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation” and it’s widely
known that the Clinton campaign was digging up political dirt on Donald Trump
from Russian sources before the election?

27. Can you confirm under oath that the dossier was not part of the FBI’s body of
evidence to justify launching Crossfire Hurricane?

28. James Comey and several other Justice Department officials used the Steele dossier
as its primary source of evidence to obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap Carter Page.
They signed the application under penalty of perjury. Would you have signed off on
that application?

29. Are you aware of any other FISA warrants on anyone who was associated with the
campaign?

30. The report acknowledges that Joseph Mifsud, the so-called professor at the center
of the Papadopoulos probe, made false statements to the FBI in early 2017. Did
your investigators locate Mifsud to interview him and why has he not been charged
him with a crime?

31. Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, is barely mentioned in your report,
although he is a central figure in the Russian collusion probe. According to an April
20, 2019 article in the New York Times, your team “debriefed Mr. Steele himself in
London for two days in September 2017.” Is this report accurate and if so why did
you debrief as opposed to interview Steele as a witness or subject in this
investigation?



 32. In Volume II, page 103, in reference to the participants in the June 2016 Trump
Tower meeting, you refer to “the firm that produced the Steele reporting.” Why did
you intentionally omit citing the name Fusion GPS or its owner, Glenn Simpson,
throughout the 448-page report?

33. Did you know that at the same time Fusion GPS was working to collect opposition
research on Donald Trump for the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National
Committee it also was representing Prevezon, a Russian-based company sanctioned
by the U.S. government?

34. Why did you omit the fact that Glenn Simpson was working with Natalia
Veselnitskya, the so-called Russian lawyer, on the Prevezon project and that
Simpson met with her before the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting that she
attended with Trump campaign associates including Donald Trump, Jr.?

35. Why did you also omit the fact the Glenn Simpson was working with Rinat
Akhmetshin, another attendee of the Trump Tower meeting, on the Prevezon
project and that Simpson met with both Veselnitskya and Akhmetshin the day after
the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting?

36. On page 47 of Volume II, the report states “evidence does establish that the
President connected the Flynn investigation to the FBI’s broader Russia
investigation and that he believed that terminating Flynn would end ‘the whole
Russia thing.’” This appears to conflate two different matters: First, when Trump
allegedly made the comment about “letting the Flynn thing go” in February 2017,
did he know that his campaign was under investigation for “collusion”?

37. When President Trump allegedly referred to the “whole Russia thing,” do you know
if he was referring to the ongoing interference investigations at the FBI and on
Capitol Hill or to the collusion investigation?

38. It appears as though Trump’s comment about letting the Flynn matter “go” was in
reference to the bogus Logan Act violation being pursued by former acting Attorney
General Sally Yates. If Trump did not know in February 2017 that Flynn had been
under investigation since July 2016 for “colluding” with the Russians to influence
the election, how can his alleged comment to let the Flynn matter “go” be
considered an attempt to obstruct the Russia investigation?

39. Aside from Comey’s own memos, do you have additional evidence to support the
allegation that the president asked Comey to drop any inquiries related to Michael
Flynn?




 40. The report cites numerous news articles, including a few that contain classified
information sourced by anonymous government officials. As you know, it is a felony
to disclose classified information, such as intercepted phone calls with foreign
ambassadors under surveillance and the existence of a FISA warrant. Did you
identify any of the government officials who were illegally leaking classified
information to the news media?

41. Is it illegal for the president of the United States to fire the FBI director, with or
without cause?

42. Is it illegal for the president of the United State to consider firing, or to fire, a special
counsel?

43. Is it illegal for the president or his advisors to give misleading information to the
media?

And here’s a bonus question for closing:

44. At what point in your investigation did you realize that there was no collusion, or, as
your report clarifies, “coordination” between the Trump campaign and the Russian
government?